When Bill Clinton was President, I tried to watch some of his speeches. I never could watch more than a few minutes (since he makes me sick), but in those few minutes he would usually say something to the effect that we have to integrate America into the world economy. He seemed to think it was self-evident that that's what we should be doing. I always wondered why. It's not clear to me that being part of the world economy is that important.
However, I am not an anti-globalization demonstrator. The other side of the argument isn't self-evident to me, either. Globalization may be a mixed blessing, but it is, in some ways, sometimes, a blessing. It may be a devil's bargain, but it is a bargain, at least in the short term.
I have seen what happens when Walmart opens a store in a small town. When I was a child, my family used to take vacations in small towns in Arkansas where we had relatives. Some people were pretty comfortable. They had farms or small businesses, or maybe a job with the gas company or the bank. Others had a very primitive existence. They lived in ramshackle houses, and some of them actually lived off the land to some extent (i.e. they would shoot a squirrel or rabbit for dinner, or go fishing -- not for sport, but for dinner). Even the people who lived comfortably were very close to the land, and they had little contact with the outside world. They had a vegetable garden and raised chickens, and many of them had a cow.
Now those towns have a Walmart, and they are connected to the world economy. The difference is like night and day. Between about 1960 and 1990, most of Arkansas emerged from the Third World into the First World. From Dogpatch to suburbia in one generation.
In 1990, when my mother was in Texarkana, one of her friends told her that her maid had just bought a new brick house. Her maid!
Of course there is a downside to this too. The independent life that people used to enjoy (and they did enjoy it, even though it seemed primitive to me) is almost impossible now. Just about everybody is on the corporate treadmill. Decisions are made in corporate boardrooms hundreds or thousands of miles away. The local culture (such as it was) has been destroyed. People live in a world of television, fast food, application forms, drug tests, identity theft, spam, etc, just like everywhere else. Those small towns that I used to visit are filling up with Mexicans. They have had a few years of prosperity, but it isn't going to last much longer. They are sinking back into the Third World. From Dogpatch to suburbia to Ciudad Juarez in two generations.
I think prosperity would have come to Arkansas anyway, without globalization. It would have taken longer, but it would also have lasted longer. It might not even have taken that much longer. Most of the difference between 1960 and 1990 probably had nothing to do with globalization.
In the Economist, December 4th, 2004, page 80, there is an article about a study which tried to quantify the benefits of globalization.
A third approach is to consider a counterfactual: what if the wave of global trade liberalisation that began after the second world war had never taken place? One study estimates that a return to 1930's style protectionism today would reduce America's GDP by 2.4%. If other countries retaliated with higher barriers of their own, GDP would fall by 2.1% more. Once again, consumers' lost product variety would have to be considered too. On this method, the total value of trade to America is put at 7.3% of GSP.
I could live with that. If GDP were 7.3% less than it is, it would take about three years to catch up. The article presents three methods of approaching the problem, and they arrive at slightly different results. In any case, without liberalized trade we would be a few years behind where we are now. In 2005, we would be where we were in 2002. So what?
The benefits of globalization are an illusion. The damage is real.
In other countries, the downside of globalization may be much more severe. In The New Yorker, April 8, 2002, page 43, there was an article about water companies in Bolivia. In one town, the local people formed a cooperative and dug a well. Then the Bolivian government signed a contract with an international water company, giving the company the entire water system. The people suddenly found that they were paying exorbitant prices for water from their own well, the well they dug themselves. They even had to pay for the water meters!
That's just one example that happened to come to my attention recently. Similar things (and worse, much worse) are happening in countries all over the world. People are told that the only way they can have a modern life is to get capital from multinational corporations, under the supervision of the World Bank and the IMF. Not only that, a "modern life" is going to be imposed on them whether they want it or not.
This is not a new phenomenon. It was already happening before there was such a thing as the World Bank. Globalization at its worst is described in Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. In the 1870's, just as vast areas of the world had been incorporated into the market economy, there were severe floods and droughts in many places, from Brazil to Egypt to India to China. This unfortunate juxtaposition of events resulted in a famine in which tens of millions of people starved. Not just millions, but tens of millions, at a time when the population of the world was only about a billion.
One of the basic planks in Hitler's platform was that Germany should be independent of international capital. He didn't want to eliminate capitalism entirely. Germany still had a capitalist economy, but it was self-contained. Businesses were still privately owned (i.e. they weren't nationalized, as they were in the Soviet Union), but they were locally owned. Capital was generated internally, within Germany. As Hitler said, "We have no unemployment, because we don't depend on exports."
In a world run according to National Socialist principles, all countries would generate capital internally. Digging your own well is a perfect example of generating your own capital by building your own infrastructure. However, Hitler said repeatedly that National Socialism was only for Germany. It was not intended to be a universal principle.
I'n not sure what he would say if he heard the story about the Bolivians whose well was ripped off. Would he sympathize with them? Or would he take the side of the corrupt politicians who sold out to the water company? The obvious injustice of the situation would not be lost on him, and yet he said it's all right for the strong to dominate the weak. He would be in a quandary about this. This is one of the gaps in his philosophy -- one of the things he never thought through.
And what do the Jews have to do with this? Good question. The short answer is that I don't really know. But they know. I bought a copy of the Jerusalem Post (issue of April 5, 2002), because I wanted to get another view of what's happening in Israel (i.e. another view besides the one I get from my usual news sources). I found something that bears on our present subject.
There is an editorial by Amotz Asa-el about the Jewish idea of tikun olam, which means "mending the world." He says that Jews should stop trying to change the world, and just think about how to escape from it or insulate themselves from it. In the course of this discussion, he mentions George Soros, who, he says, is "in the habit of shedding crocodile tears over capitalism's wrongs." He goes on to say:
...the day is near when those who today hide behind the amorphous of definition [sic] of "anti-globalization activists" will come forth with conspiracy theories linking the excessively high profile and world-mending Soros with other global Jewish economic players, like the IMF's Stanley Fischer, the World bank's James Wolfensohn, the US Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan.
Until I read this, it had not occurred to me to make that connection. I didn't even know Wolfensohn was a Jew. But Mr. Asa-el thinks this is so obvious that anti-globalization activists must know it too, and they must be "hiding" behind the anti-globalization slogan. The demonstrators say they are against globalization, but (according to him) what they really mean is that they are against the Jews.
Well, I'm not hiding. I just didn't know. This is his conspiracy theory, not mine. He thinks it's self-evident that being against globalization amounts to the same thing as being against the Jews. It's not that obvious to me, but I'll take his word for it. Apparently he knows something I don't.
Actually I don't think there is a conspiracy in the literal sense of the word. This applies to economics and to all other areas where there is supposed to be a Jewish "conspiracy." It is possible for people to work together for a common purpose without an overt conspiracy. Judaism works like Adam Smith's invisible hand. It's an automatic mechanism that doesn't require conscious coordination or supervision. There are no physical meetings of the Elders of Zion. When we think in those terms we just confuse ourselves.
Nevertheless it is true that the "global Jewish economic players" (as Amotz Asa-el says) are pressing ahead with globalization.
It is also true that local cultures all over the planet are being destroyed (some more than others).
Hitler didn't intend to let that happen to Germany. He tried to secede from the global economic system. He wanted to expand Germany to the east, so the Germans would have enough space and enough resources to establish an autarkic economy. That's what World War II was basically about (at least the war on the Eastern front).
He failed.
International capitalism doesn't permit anybody to secede from it (as the Japanese found out as far back as 1854). Even if Hitler had won the war, he still would have failed in the long run. Eventually Germany would have been reabsorbed into the world economy. On another part of the site, I argued that autarky is unstable. The context for that argument was very different, but I think the principle applies here as well. There is no use trying to completely withdraw from the global economy. That's as futile as trying to get around the second law of thermodynamics.
The Second World War was misconceived and unnecessary. Hitler went off half-cocked. He didn't have to be in a big hurry about expanding Germany. He should have taken his time, and concentrated on rebuilding German society from the ground up. In particular, he should have made sure that there was no political class pursuing its own interests at the expense of the people.
Of course he did try to do that, but he didn't appreciate how incredibly difficult it is. Instead of giving that task the attention it requires, and sticking with it until it was finished (which would take decades), he let himself get distracted. He let himself get drawn into a war that could only end in disaster.
It's an illusion to think there could ever be a Final Solution to the globalization problem. The economic forces that lead to globalization are always with us, like entropy. The only way to protect ourselves from the corrosive effects of globalization (or from the corrosive effects of money) is to establish a just society. When I say this would take decades, even that falls short of the truth. It's a task that can never be finished. Every generation has to deal with it anew.
It is possible for a country to insulate itself from the corrosive effects of globalization, at least to some extent, if that's what the government wants to do. Going back to the example mentioned above, the Bolivian government didn't have to rip off the Indians. They could have negotiated a fair contract with the water company. They didn't have to give away the whole water system. If they thought their main task was to protect their people, they could. James Wolfensohn, Stanley Fischer, George Soros, and Alan Greenspan aren't stopping them from negotiating a fair contract. International capitalism requires everybody to participate, but it doesn't require anybody to exploit anybody else.
It should be noted that the Bolivian politicians are not Jews. (I don't know about the owners of the water company.) South America was already a profoundly unjust society before the Jews arrived, and even before the Spanish arrived.
The Bolivian politicians think their main task is to line their own pockets by exploiting the poor, so that's what they do, but this isn't the fault of the global economic system. It's just a reflection of the dog-eat-dog character of Bolivian society. International capitalism doesn't create unfairness, it just magnifies the unfairness that is already there. As one Argentine politician was candid enough to admit, "The problem is that we are all sons of bitches, myself included."
A cohesive society with a very high level of honesty, integrity, and social responsibility would have little to fear from capitalism. So, how do we create such a society? The answer is not to be found in Mein Kampf.
In fact Hitler wanted to create exactly the kind of dog-eat-dog society that makes exploitation intevitable. At least that's what he said he wanted, sometimes. He wasn't consistent about this. If you look at the society he actually created, as revealed in the Ministry of Illusion film series, it turns out to be the opposite of what you would expect. There are no blond beasts in these movies. There are no Nietzschean themes at all. The atmosphere is reminiscent of Goethe's Elective Affinities.
However, the Nietzschean element was certainly there, in the Nazi Party if not in the society at large. After the war, Bolivia was one of the few countries where Nazis could find refuge.
Two reviews of Late Victorian Holocausts:
"Hunger Strike" - the famines that fed the empire, by Sukhdev Sandhu
"How the East Grew Poor: Imperial weather and the poverty of nations," by L. E. Birdzell, Jr.
I'm sure some of what I hear about the IMF is true. Some of it, but I don't know how much. Unfortunately, there is a certain amount of disinformation to confuse matters. Here are a couple of interviews between Alex Jones and Greg Palast, both well-known anti-globalists.
The IMF intentionally destabilizes countries
An interview with Greg Palast about the World Bank and related matters
The second interview casts doubt on my statement above that the Bolivians could have negotiated a fair contract with the water companies. Palast says:
And you open this stuff up [i.e. secret documents he obtained] and these are programs which point-by-point, I mean they go on for sometimes one-hundred pages, and they have specific demands on each country. Which if they don't agree to - they call them conditionalities - and they average 114 conditionalities per nation. You get your international finance - it's cut off unless you agree to the whole package. And one nation after another is required to sell-off their water systems, electric systems to foreign operators. It requires the sale of the banks to foreign operators, allowing, changing rules to allow the banks to remove the capital from nations.
Maybe so, but I'm always suspicious when people refer to documents that can't be checked out. The interviewer, Alex Jones, refers to a CFR report by Gary Hart, Warren Rudman, et al., which had just been published, "America Still Unprepared - America Still in Danger." He says this about it:
Well, it just says that give total control to a select group of corporations, under CFR control, nationalize basically everything but have control of the private corporations, put troops in all the factories and on the streets - or, they say on page 31, eighty to eighty plus percent will die in major cities. They say if we follow their orders only 20% of us are going to die. This is an incredibly chilling document... what I'm trying to say here Greg Palast is that what's in the IMF plan for total takeover by the international banks is exactly what's in this 40-page report.
This can be checked out. The report says no such thing. I had just read the report a few days before I read the interview, so this jumped out at me. The Jones/Palast interview was originally on Jones's radio show, and of course the radio audience had no way to verify what was being claimed. I have provided a link to the source. If you click on the link given above, you can download the document and read it, and see for yourself what it does and does not say. He's lying.
Four years later, the report costs $10, so you can't just click on the link and look it up, which pulls the rug out from under the previous paragraph. Such is the internet.
In view of this, I have to wonder what I would find if I could read the "secret documents" Greg Palast refers to. I don't imagine the documents say what he claims they say (assuming they even exist). Like a lot of people, what these guys are counting on is that almost nobody looks things up. (The same point came up in another context on this site - see the Six Reasons page, reason #5, and the Dead Footnote Page.)
There is something bogus about this discussion. These people are evangelists of some kind. They are trying to get us to buy into their belief system. They want us to get worked up about it. I'm not sure why. Maybe they just want to sell books, or maybe they have some hidden agenda. Probably both. I think they are trying to frame the discussion in such a way as to make it impossible to see what's really going on. I'm not sure exactly what their game is, but I recognize the same bogusness that I have seen in many other such discussions. The more I think about this, the less worked up I get.
Nevertheless I'm sure some of the horror stories I hear about globalization are true. Economies have been imploding all over the world, from Russia to Argentina to Southeast Asia, and nobody is safe. A decade from now, Japan and the United States could look like Argentina. We have made a devil's bargain with globalization, and there's going to be hell to pay.
We seem to be headed for a future in which there are a few first-world islands in a third-world sea, and the islands are shrinking. Hitler wanted to create a future in which the first world expands and pushes the third world back. That's what I want too, but I don't know how to make it happen. Hitler's strategy involved attacking the problem on two fronts: (1) establish a national government strong enough to declare its independence from the international financial system, and (2) create a culture in which Germans feel good enough about themselves to have children.
It's almost impossible for me to believe that either part of this can be done, let alone both parts. The first part by itself is hard enough. As he said in Mein Kampf, Hitler always knew that his most difficult struggle would be against international capital. It defeated him, of course, and I don't know if there is any way to resist it. In a series of articles in Asia Times, "Banking Bunkum", Henry C. K. Liu has published some thoughts that may point in the right direction. It's the best critique of the banking system I have found, but I'm not sure it leads to a practical course of action.
This much is clear: any solution to this problem requires the cooperation of many countries. If Japan, China, Russia, and the Euro countries all worked together, they might be able to declare their independence from the IMF. One country by itself has no chance. Therefore National Socialism, as originally conceived by Hitler, is irrelevant to our present situation.
Even if the first problem could be solved, the second one remains. As long as first-world people don't have children, they are going to be inundated by a flood of third-world immigrants. That will happen regardless of what anybody does about the financial system. I don't know how to motivate people to have children (I don't even have any myself), so I'm going to admit defeat and stop here.
The amazing thing about Hitler is that he stood up and said It can be done, and people believed him. We don't have to settle for depression and hopelessness. The defeatism that holds us all down can be brushed aside. We can live. That's what everybody was waiting to hear. That's what we are still waiting for: someone with enough faith to give us faith.
The fact that he came so close and failed makes it that much harder to conceive of anyone succeeding. But I'm not admitting defeat permanently. I still know in my heart of hearts that it's possible for someone to stand up and say It can be done, and then go ahead and do it. It's possible to revive a dying nation. It's possible for someone to lead us away from death, towards life.
"Even those who are still doing well have to work 14-hour
days and most families need to be two-income households to
make do. The press has stopped running stories about people
with $60,000 annual incomes living in their cars in Silicon
Valley because it is no longer news.
"There was a moment in the late 1960s, before the Vietnam
War blew away all of America's surpluses, when people with
good incomes were beginning to take three-day weekends on a
regular year-around basis and eight-week vacations. From
Los Angeles to Dallas to Scarsdale, fathers were home by
5:30 pm barbecuing for the whole family and mothers had
time for their children..."
-- Henry C. K. Liu
Note added in the fall of 2004:
Globalization brings everybody down to the same third-world level. The only way to prevent this is to close off certain areas from the rest of the world and to create a self-contained economy within those areas. This is, simply, National Socialism. It could just as well be called National Capitalism.
If Hitler had tried to talk about National Capitalism, he would have immediately lost his audience, since capitalism was a dirty word to working class Germans at that time. Now, of course, it's the reverse. Socialism has been discredited, and almost nobody wants to call himself a socialist, national or otherwise. It's the idea of a national economy that's important, not what you call it.
The fact that I, personally, am not a nationalist has no bearing on the matter. The fact that Nazism, in its original form, was tangled up with Nietzscheanism is also irrelevant. You can be a National Socialist even though you despise storm troopers, the Gestapo, Nietzsche, Wagner, and most of the other stuff associated with Nazi Germany.
The fact that no economy can ever be completely autarkic is also irrelevant. As with most things in life, we have to deal in approximations. It is possible to have an economy that is self-contained, for the most part, with only limited interaction with the rest of the world. Specifically, it is possible to have an economy in which companies are not allowed to outsource professional jobs and skilled manufacturing jobs. That could be done right now, if the government had the will to do it. The problem is that the will to do it can only come as a result of a deeper cultural change.
In the Third Reich, that change was made. In 1936, Germany was by far the most prosperous country in the world. National Socialism worked. In the long run, it is the only thing that will work. We will either have a first-world future or a third-world future, depending on which path we follow - Nazism or globalization.
The original idea of post-Nazism was to take up where Hitler left off, and do what he should have done. In the last few years I have gotten discouraged and just about given up on post-Nazism, but that's stupid. We should hold fast to our vision and never give up.
Hitler's most radical idea was that life should make sense. It goes without saying that the Third Reich fell far, far short of that ideal. Nevertheless the principle is still valid, and I will never give up on it.
"The Good Society" by Matt Koehl
This morning I would like to talk about the good society.
More specifically, I would like to discuss the economic and
social aspects of a good society.
What should these be? What are the signs of such a society?
Let's take a look...
Among other things in such a society, we would want a
stable and prosperous economy, one with full employment and
living wages. We would want affordable housing, whether in
the purchasing or renting of a home. We would want a system
of health care accessible to everyone, regardless of
economic circumstance. We would want generous provision for
disability, maturnity leave and retirement. We would want
free access to college education and vocational training
for any qualified applicant. We would want a healthy
farming community, one which favors small family farms over
large agribusiness conglomerates.
We would want the kind of public safety where one didn't
have to live in gated communities to feel secure, and where
one could walk down the street of any city at any time, day
or night-without fear of being mugged, assaulted, or worse.
We would want rigorous protection of the environment under
a regime that is more concerned about the condition of our
forests, our earth, our air and our waters than about
corporate profit and pollution.
These are some the things we would want - for every citizen
of our good society.
Today, we have NONE of these things. Why? Do these
expectations of a good society sound unreasonable, or
utopian?
I say to you that they are not - as is proven by the fact
that there once was a society which had all of these things
and more.
Continued...
back to the post-Nazi home page